Reason No. 857 why being a parent is really, really hard. I had a lot of comments recently asking about a parenting practice I’d mentioned casually but never fully explained. I decided to share it today because of something that happened last night—probably the second-best parenting thing I’ve ever done.
This is especially helpful if you have a child who can’t turn off their brain and internalizes everything. That combination can be really difficult for a kid. The result is that they will obsess over something that happened—whether it’s today, yesterday, or a month ago—and because of that, especially at night, they won’t be able to sleep.
Why ‘What Do You Want to Talk About?’ Works Better Than “What’s Wrong?”
This started last year when my oldest was in kindergarten. Three nights in a row, it was a struggle to get her to fall asleep. At that age, anxiety doesn’t manifest the same way it does for adults. Sometimes kids act out, bounce off the walls, or develop little nervous habits.
On night four, I finally asked her, “Riley, is there something you want to talk to me about?” She immediately broke down. Four days earlier, she had accidentally colored on the carpet at school. The guilt from that was literally eating her brain.
We talked about it for about 25 minutes. I told her that the next day we would go into school together, tell the teacher, and I would be there as she apologized. That night, she slept peacefully.
That moment evolved into a nightly practice. Instead of asking, “Is there anything you want to talk about?” I started asking, “What do you want to talk about?” The difference is subtle but powerful. The first question implies that the answer might be no—it’s easy for a child to say no and bury whatever is bothering them. The second question implies that the answer is already yes: there is something, and we’re going to talk about it.
Two Surprising Benefits of This Nightly Parenting Habit
I’ve been doing this for about a year and a half now. It’s by no means a cure-all, but I’ve noticed she is less stressed, less anxious, and she gets really good sleep. Some nights she says, “I don’t have anything to talk about.” Other nights she’ll say, “Three weeks ago, Molly didn’t sit next to me in class, and it really hurt my feelings.”
First benefit: it allows me an easy avenue to talk to her when something is bothering me. The other night, while my youngest was trying to sleep, Riley was reading and absentmindedly stomping her foot on the ground. I asked her to stop—and then she did it one more time while looking at me. I said, “One thing I really want to talk about is that it bothers me when I ask you to stop doing something and you just do it one more time.” Because I used the same language we always use, she saw it as a shared dialogue rather than criticism.
Second benefit: there are moments like last night. I put her to bed and asked, “What do you want to talk about?” She paused for a second and said, “I was just thinking about what awesome parents I have.”
One of the hardest parts about being a parent is coming to the realization that it is not our kids’ job to make our lives easier—it is our job to make their lives easier. This simple nightly question has helped us do exactly that.
